"He said you haven't seen him play since he was ten. He said your mom leaves a cake on your step." Tavo hesitated. "He saw the stitches yesterday and he knew they were yours. And then he found out you'd been at the park with me for three years. Every morning. Two miles from his house." He looked down at his hands. "I think that's why he was like that. At tryouts. I don't think it was about the shoes."
Wyn sat very still at the card table.
Outside, in the alley, somebody at the tire shop was running an impact wrench, a long ratcheting scream, then silence, then again.
"I didn't think about it like that," Wyn said finally. His voice was very low. "I thought, he's got Dad. He's got the club. He's got everything I had. He doesn't need me hanging around." He laughed, without any sound in it. "And you. You didn't have anything. You had a dollar-store ball going flat and canvas sneakers. I thought, here's somebody I can actually help, and it won't cost anybody anything." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Man. I really thought it didn't cost anybody anything."
Tavo did not say anything. He did not know what there was to say.
After a while Wyn took his hands down. His eyes were red.
"Coach," he said. "Did she say anything? About the penalty?"
"She said she'd tell me her part. Someday."
Wyn nodded. "She thinks it's her fault," he said. "I heard. From one of the guys, a couple years after. She stopped coaching club. People said it was her knee, and her knee's real, but somebody heard her say once she'd called it. She'd called top corner, and I went top corner, and I went over, and she thinks if she'd kept her mouth shut I'd have gone low and buried it and gone to Stanford and." He waved a hand at the room: the card table, the milk crate, the window looking out at the tire shop. "And not this."
"Is she right?"
"No." He said it fast and certain. "God, no. I'd have gone top corner if she'd said bottom left. It was my shot. It was always my shot. And I'd have quit if I'd scored. Maybe a year later. Maybe in college, in some worse way. But I'd have quit." He looked at Tavo. "I never told her that. I never told her anything. I just walked off the field. I couldn't look at her. She'd stitched my shoe in her hotel room and I couldn't even look at her."
"You could tell her now."
Wyn looked at the photo over the bed for a long time.